Thursday, June 4, 2015

RIBBONS OF DEATH BY EDITA A. PETRICK - VIRTUAL TOUR + Q&A + GIVEAWAY

Ribbons of Death

by Edita
A. Petrick

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

BLURB

When
a horribly scarred man knocks on the door of Stella Hunter’s ramshackle cottage
in upstate Montana, she lets him in. What’s there to lose? The book critics
killed her chances to warn the world about myths and legends behind the myths
and legends.

But
once the man pushes a book smudged with bloody fingerprints across the table,
Stella sees a glimmer of hope. She may yet repair her academic reputation. She
may re-establish her credibility within the scientific community and she may
vindicate her ‘peace-taker’ theory. She may also be murdered by anyone standing
next to her if her theory is correct.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

EXCERPT

He kept his head tucked between his shoulders, watching one
‘on-the-scene’ reporter after another give commentaries to the police and
medical work that went on in the background. Suddenly he felt Stella’s hand
settle on his and turned his head. She was saying something. He pulled down the
earphones because he wasn’t in a lip-reading mood.

“He struck at a local fair,” she said quietly.

He remembered her saying something like that earlier, though
at the time it could have been just sarcasm.

“Your prediction was right,” he said.

“Yes but it’s something else. Let me have the laptop.”

He watched her call up a map of Dayton, Ohio, then zoom in
and start pointing with the mouse arrow at the names of communities mentioned
by the news reporters: Oakwood, Kettering, Whites Corners.

“Here,” she said, pointing the mouse at the red line of
Interstate 675. “This is where the southbound effect stopped or played out. I
didn’t hear any reports of an outbreak of madness in Belmont or Shakertown.
None west of Interstate 75 either. It affected a long strip about half a mile
wide at best; in geographical terms certainly a ribbon of madness that ended at
I-657.”

“Another atypical strike,” he murmured. They didn’t need
more puzzles. They were still trying to make sense of what they had.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

STUPID QUESTIONS WITH AWESOME ANSWERS!

Q. As a famous athlete, you are offered $100,000
to endorse a product you wouldn't use. Do you endorse it?

A.Yes. Because then, to satisfy my own sense of
integrity, I would sample the product, put down its good or positive points,
and make it a condition (I would have a crack-agent to represent me, right?) of
my promotion that the copy-ad people writing the promo could only make those
claims that were true.

Believe me, advertising people have a way of
coming up with a positive spin on anything – even the Devil himself. eg. …his dominion is a warm, cozy place where
the dry heat will be beneficial for your aching bones…etc. etc.

Q. A
friend ask you to write a reference for a job you feel he's poorly qualified
for. Do you refuse?

A. No.
Same principle as above. Regardless of what I felt about his qualifications for
the job, he/she is my friend, therefore I would know all his/her good points
and those would be the ones I’d put into the letter of recommendation. I would
put down all the things I like about him/her and why he/she is my friend and
why I value our friendship.

Q. You
find an expensive pen in a public lounge. Do you keep it?

A. Yes –
unless it bore some kind of inscription, for example pens (even expensive ones)
often have advertisement written on them, together with a phone number or
website url. But if it was simply an expensive pen, I would keep it, especially
if I found it in a widely-used, crowded public place. There’s no sense to make
a spectacle of yourself in a crowded public place, running up to strangers and
asking them if the pen was theirs. I would have no way of knowing if the person
who stepped up to claim it was really the pen’s owner. Besides, such action
these days is not very safe.

Q. When
cleaning up, you find your teenager's diary. Do you read it?

A. Oh,
yes. I’m a mother—a single mother at that. I wouldn’t wish upon anyone what I
went through with my kids when they reached teenagehood. I didn’t buckle and I
didn’t give up, but truth be told, many times I came crack-close to it. So,
yes, I would read the diary to make sure that nothing was brewing in the kid’s
head that needed serious intervention. And even if the diary had just normal
angst-content, I would tell my teenager what happened, that I found the diary
and glanced through it to make sure he/she was making the right lifestyle
choices. I would speak to the kid plainly and without being apologetic about
it, because I am his/her parent, and do not want to become friends with their
parole officers.

Q. A
friend’s fiancé is coming on to you. Do you tell your friend?

A. No. I
would tell the fiancé, in no uncertain way, to fix his attitude and work on his
relationship instead of shopping for partners for his extracurricular
activities.

Then,
as time and opportunity permitted, I would try to get my friend to start asking
herself (I’m assuming here it’s my girlfriend) why she is with this guy; what
she sees in him; what does she see as reciprocal benefits of their
relationship. I would get her to start defining what she wants out of the
relationship and why she took up with the guy in the first place. I would tell
her that ‘examining’ relationships from time to time is necessary in order to
make that relationship grow – in the right direction.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Thank
you for the opportunity to let me answer these interesting questions and I
enjoyed very much indulging in a bit of introspection – again. It gave me an
opportunity to ‘glance back,’ so to speak, and reflect on a long stretch of
very difficult times where the only people I could talk to were very expensive
marriage counselors and even more expensive therapists and psychologists, and
grief counselors and social workers and so on. I sailed through the turbulent
seas but I did not emerge unscathed. And all I learned from the experience was
that while it’s true that hardships make you stronger, I would have been just
as strong if not stronger without them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

By
profession, I’m an engineer and ten years ago, I left a corporate job to
concentrate on writing. It was perhaps the scariest thing I’ve done. Of course,
there were other considerations at the time, life, kids, economy and my mother
who was battling cancer. I wrote as means of staying grounded because I had to
hold it together. There was no one else to pitch in. There wasn’t a single
moment that I didn’t have doubts about whether what I was doing was the right
thing or not, but doubts come and go, while the need to write goes on forever.
Since 2005 I’ve published 5 books and this year alone I have 6 new ones coming
out. I live in Toronto with my family and our two pets – wheaten terriers. And
whenever I’m tempted to look back, and start second-guessing my past decisions,
I sit behind the computer and start another book. At least for me, that’s a
cure-all.